Next in our Meet the members blog series is INASP, who isn’t a direct member, but acts as a Sponsor for hundreds of members. Sioux Cumming, Programme Specialist at INASP tells us a bit about the work they’re doing, how they use Crossref and what the future plans for INASP are. Can you tell us a little bit about INASP? INASP is an international development organization working with a global network of partners in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

The Crossref graph of the research enterprise is growing at an impressive rate of 2.5 million records a month - scholarly communications of all stripes and sizes. Preprints are one of the fastest growing types of content. While preprints may not be new, the growth may well be: ~30% for the past 2 years (compared to article growth of 2-3% for the same period). We began supporting preprints in November 2016 at the behest of our members.

From time to time we get questions from members asking what the difference is between reference linking and registering references as part the Content Registration process.

What do you think of when you think of Chicago? Deep dish pizza? Art Deco architecture? Well for one week only this year you can add scholarly publishing to the list as the #SSP2018 Conference comes to town. Some Crossref people are excited to be heading out for the conference, and we’re looking forward to meeting as many of our members as possible.

Exciting news! We are getting very close to the beta release of a new tool to publicly show metadata coverage. As members register their content with us they also add additional information which gives context for other members and for services that help e.g. discovery or analytics. Richer metadata makes content useful. Participation reports will give—for the first time—a clear picture for anyone to see the metadata Crossref has.

Crossref has decided to change the HTTP redirect code used by our DOIs from 303 back to the more commonly used 302. Our implementation of 303 redirects back in 2010 was based on recommended best practice for supporting linked data identifiers. Unfortunately, very few other parties have adopted this practice.

Continuing our blog series highlighting the uses of Crossref metadata, we talked to Gavin Reddick, Chief Analyst at Researchfish about the work they’re doing, and how they’re using our REST API as part of their workflow. Introducing Researchfish Researchfish is the world’s leading platform for the reporting of the outputs, outcomes and impacts of funded research.

Aliaksandr Birukou is the Executive Editor for Computer Science at Springer Nature and is chair of the Group that has been working to establish a persistent identifier system and registry for scholarly conferences. Here Alex provides some background to the work and asks for input from the community: Roughly one year ago, Crossref and DataCite started a working group on conference and project identifiers.

Do you want to effect change for the scholarly community? The Crossref Nominating Committee is inviting expressions of interest to serve on the Board as it begins its consideration of a slate for the November 2018 election. The key responsibilities of the Board are: Setting the strategic direction for the organization; Providing

You want to hear more from us. We hear you. We’ve spent the past year building Crossref Event Data, and hope to launch very soon. Building a new piece of infrastructure from scratch has been an exciting project, and we’ve taken the opportunity to incorporate as much feedback from the community as possible. We’d like to take a moment to share some of the suggestions we had, and how we’ve acted on them.

I joined Crossref only a few weeks ago, and have happily thrown myself into the world of Event Data as the service’s new product manager. In my first week, a lot of time was spent discussing the ins and outs of Event Data. This learning process made me very much feel like you might when you’ve just bought a house, and you’re studying the blueprints while also planning the house-warming party.